


Infernally Yours

by BrazenHussy



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Demons, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Hellstrop, Interspecies Relationship(s), Older Man/Younger Woman, Silver Fox, Size Kink, Slow Build, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-13 07:41:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16013387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrazenHussy/pseuds/BrazenHussy
Summary: One is a manipulative demon who's lucky numbers are 1, 23 and 58, and the other is a immortal being with abilities you can only dream of. A relationship between two such beings is bound to be a total dumpster fire but, human or demon, who doesn't like to watch things burn...?





	1. Surprise!

Everything is fine, Michael thinks to himself as he stands on the other side of the door. It’s all going to be fine. Out in the hallway, just coming back to consciousness, is the toxic key that’s going to unlock his masterpiece.

There is so much riding on this, but this pathetic human body seems to enjoy expressing his nervousness as a painful tensing of his shoulders. He takes a deep, calming breath and remembers back to the moment he’d chosen her… 

The algorithm he’d designed from scratch had brought up precisely 23,656 individuals from his file who might be the right fit for his experiment, and he knew his first choice was the most critical. For a moment he had tried to scan the first few names with his ridiculous human eyes, but they quickly rebelled and drifted to the blueprints still cluttering his desk. 

Neighborhood 12358W; the number mere chance, but as his plans formed it became a private joke if only because none of his colleagues had got it. Even as he looked something twitched in the back of his mind; a misfiring neuron, a stray impulse, the act of an unknowable and mischievous God… whatever it was, he flipped suddenly to bio 12,358 and begin to read. 

She was monstrous. Awful. The absolute worst. 

She was perfect, and in that instant he had known he would build his whole world around her…

He forces his shoulders to relax, and slips an easy smile on to his face as he opens the door. 

She looks the same as her file photo, yet different. It makes sense; no photo captured your good side in The Bad Place. She’s certainly physically attractive for a human, but it’s the kind of thing a being who can see in nine dimensions only notes in an abstract sort of way. What he does notice is that the picture didn’t capture the calculating shrewdness in the blue of her eyes, or the way her smile combined a superficial cordiality with the subtle threat of bared teeth. For a moment his interest is strangely piqued, and he feels the feigned warmth in his voice veer sharply towards the disturbingly genuine. 

‘Eleanor? Come on in.’

***

He’s freakin’ tall, is Eleanor’s first thought. He’s kinda old, is her second. Her third thought, which is filed away for reflection at a later time as she is ushered through the door, is that she might have a mild nerd kink. Whatever, it’s one of many; if there is one thing she doesn’t judge herself for it’s her sexual tastes. The horn wants what it wants.

Dead. She’s dead, he says. Okay, cool. Cool. Weirdly it doesn’t sound as bad as it should coming from him. His eyes seem very blue as he confirms she’s in The Good Place. Huh. Did she have a purse? No. Get it together, loser.

It’s distractingly beautiful here, but not enough to stop her noticing that he keeps touching her. Nothing sleazy, just too gentle pats on her arm; a large hand, lightly steering, resting on her lower back. It doesn’t bother her; she’s let strangers touch her far more intimately on shorter acquaintance than this. That’s not what’s making her nervous.

The house is awful, and if the clown paintings hadn’t confirmed that massive screw-up had occurred the video memories do. Still she smiles until her soul mate rocks up. Seriously, Chidi? Ugh, what the hell kind of name is that? That’s what happens when you come from Sentinel or wherever. As soon as he starts talking the Shellstrop in her has sized him up. A happy little fish who never had to learn young how to swim with sharks, and can't see the one in front of him is circling, boxing him in with promises he’ll have to keep. Just keep swimming, Chidi, just keep swimming. She can use him. She can use anyone.

She meets others, and the crawling knowledge that they are better than her makes her dislike them on sight. Tahani she may even put the effort in to hate, if only because even being booped on the nose doesn’t quite allay her bi-curious feelings for this cartoon giraffe and her stupid accent. Later, the only thing she does vaguely register that night, before the champagne and the shrimps and the giant ladybug backed by Ariana Grande wipe it from her mind, is the suspicion that she and Michael have something in common; that perhaps he isn’t meant to be here either.


	2. ‘…flesh and bones and sinew…’

He’s half aware that’s he’s trailed off, and that she is looking at him strangely. But the image has called to ancient instincts, and he feels a sharp urge to see her not as Eleanor, the monstrous center of his world, but instead as a walking heap of meat that he wants to rend and torment and taste between teeth this human body he wears could never contain.

That’s how one of his kind would see her. That’s how he should see her. Just bloody tissue intricately arranged around pulsing organs and supporting struts of layered calcium deposits, threaded through with enough nerves on which to build eons of pain and suffering. But he doesn’t. He never really has.

It’s the details, Michael thinks, where humans say the devil lies, and they’ve always been his particular curse. He notices the things the others don’t; he remembers their surprise when he knew where the Janets were stored. It wasn't even a secret, they just hadn’t been interested enough to find out. It had set him apart, this drive to innovate, to improve. He had taken the time to notice that humans had evolved beyond fearing claws in the night to embrace new agonies of loneliness, rejection, failure, self-loathing... and of course clowns…

…and yet how many times had he been on the receiving end of rolled eyes and a variation of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.’ His associates were happy with a rule of thumb approach, admittedly one that was usually severed, but to him that was so dull, so uninspired… 

She’s still looking at him, slightly bemused, clutching the To Go cups she had just complimented. How odd that this precise human is also one to notice such tiny details; neither his coworkers nor the other humans have, and he hadn’t been lying when he said he worked hard on that. Never having been to The Good Place, it had been an alien experience to find he had a talent for reinventing all the little things he assumed the real Good Place would offer without access to anything but a lone Janet. 

Perhaps he had made a mistake. Perhaps the cups should leak and burn her fragile human skin with scalding liquid. It was classic Bad Place, and in that instant he knew such an action would be a betrayal. Not of Eleanor, obviously, but of all the work he had put into this, his chance to demonstrate another way. He couldn’t cheapen it with a simple first-degree burn.

She alone had appreciated his work, and he had a thousand years in which to torture her. Michael smiled; just this once, he would be generous. 

‘Anyway, enjoy your coffee. And the cup.’

***

Eleanor is not much given to reflection, but when she considers the last few hours, she’s inclined to think she’s pretty much nailed this place. 

Despite the chaos she’s… probably? possibly? allegedly?... yeah, allegedly caused with her unexpected presence, within a day she has made Chidi her willing accomplice, and is starting to feel more in control. Sure, it cost her a little to run garbage detail, and she was bummed to miss out on freakin’ flying, but looking at the long game? This Shellstrop was playing the system and coming out ahead.

Okay, so she was going to have to try to be a better person, or at least fake being so, which was clearly going to suck, but Chidi wasn’t so bad, and anything was better than a place where the bears have two mouths. How does that even work? Does it have two heads? Or is the other mouth at the back? Somehow that seems worse. 

Hey, she’d even learned Senegal for him, though he hadn’t been as grateful as she expected. I mean there are a lot of countries in Africa, man! There’s Egypt… then the one with the terrorists, another definitely has pirates, which is kinda cool. There’s a South Africa, so guessing there’s probably a North Africa as well. And there must a Congo because she saw that movie with the killer gorillas, so she’s got like half of them down already. It’s not like he could name all 50 states, and even if he can she still wins as it just makes him even more of a nerd.

Weirdly the nerd vibe is still kinda doing it for her, though the nerd thing now seems to apply even more to Chidi than to Michael. Chidi actually has a chalkboard; way, way more nerdy than Michael’s simple desk. She’s not seen much of Michael today, though she spotted him from a distance enjoying frozen yoghurt with Tahani and that hot, dumb monk. 

She’s still not quite sure what box to put Michael in. If she’s ever given much thought to angels, she thought they’d be calm and androgynously beautiful, like something she’d seen in store Christmas displays as a child, carefully blocking the surveillance camera while her mom slipped smoked salmon into her purse. Not once had she imagined nervy silver foxes with broad shoulders that tower over her and share Gene Shalit’s taste in neckties.

That's why she likes systems, hierarchies, things she can understand and work out what to avoid or who to manipulate. If you understand the system, you have a chance to stay one step ahead of it and avoid life coming to bite you in the ass when you least expect it.

Like when someone slips a scrawled note under your door that says ‘You don’t belong here’.


	3. Where's the beef?

Michael frowned distractedly at a paperclip as he tried and failed to make it travel between his knuckles; barely a week in and the humans were already forcing him to deviate from his precisely engineered 14 million point plan. 

Well, perhaps deviation was too strong a word. Acceleration might be more appropriate. After all, he had always intended for Chidi to coach Eleanor at being a better person eventually, placing him squarely in a torturous ethical quandary for decades. He had hoped for months of Eleanor twisting in the wind as Chidi painfully deliberated the pros and cons of aiding her, and instead he agreed with near lightning speed and caught Michael on the hop. Honestly, he still wasn’t quite sure how she’d done it.

Michael had always known he would have to improvise, but he had to admit to some disappointment at this turn of events. He’d been so looking forward to adding to Chidi’s suffering with some oblivious compliments about his unwavering moral code, putting him through stomachache after stomachache. Sighing, Michael realized that he’d also have to dial back the chaos around Eleanor’s infractions to match her efforts at improvement, which probably meant abandoning his long cherished plan of giving the neighborhood fountain an R. Kelly themed makeover. 

None of this had been helped by his failure in trying to improve Janet. The cruel and distant Janet had reminded him of Bad Janet, and for some reason he had found that version far more disturbing than the Janet who had suggestively tried to tug out his pocket handkerchief with her teeth. How odd it had felt, to point out Chidi’s sabotaging of his own work through continual revision while knowing he was doing exactly the same thing.

Still, at least his image as an inveterate tinkerer had masked his true motive today. He needed to pull Chidi slightly away from Eleanor, retarding her progress and getting the plan back on track. As that had met with only partial success, he had decided to double down on his insurance strategy and sidetrack Eleanor by making her his assistant; it might also give him some useful insight into her methods of manipulation.

It had almost been too easy to set up. A carefully phrased initial request to Tahani, delicately implying she would be failing her soulmate by spending so much time away from him, and she took it from there. Michael smirked as he recalled the hunted look in Eleanor’s eyes on realising she was cornered, desperately seeking an out he had no intention of giving her. 

Oh yes, this was going to be fun.

…

Eleanor had done her best to dodge the blame, but once you’ve committed psychic arson on a defenseless plant in front of moral philosophy professor, even a Shellstrop has to throw up her hands and assume the position. Paradise had a tendency to suck, and it was totally on her.

Even Chidi no longer tried to hide the fact that he thought she was the worst person here, and this was the Chidi who had spent over an hour debating the environmental merits of oat milk versus almond milk in front of her. Not with her, just in front of her.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had just worked out with Tahani. She had been so ready to get her hate on with that perfect princess. She could have vented all her old ways into limited interactions with her, then spent the rest of the time being the better person she needed to be, or at least good enough so that the local vegetation didn’t combust. It would have been so easy to bitch and moan to Chidi about her stupid accent and frenemy mind games by day, while exploring some rather erotically charged cat fight fantasies by night. Her aim in spending the day with her had simply been to add some hate-flavoured vodka to that particular fire, particularly when she suspected her of sending that note. 

It had seemed promising at first. The whole day was spent hearing how everyone admired Tahani, then seeing why they admired her – damn that maple butter scone! They had discussed the chaos without Eleanor giving herself away, but she didn’t feel great when told how Jianyu had needed to console Michael; some might have put it down to guilt, but she was fairly certain it was the three extra scones she hated herself for eating. After a full day of it, stealing her diary had not even caused Eleanor a second thought, and Chidi’s guilt trip had only been sufficient for Eleanor to return it unread. She certainly wasn’t going to be getting any friendlier with Tahani than the pretense of goodness required… 

…Dammit! Big, brown vulnerable eyes, a few tears down a fawn fantasy of a face and that plan was totally screwed. Not that they were going to be making friendship bracelets and braiding each other’s hair just yet, but she wasn’t totally indifferent to Tahani now, and not because she might easily be persuaded to try some vanilla caramel swirl. 

Despite being rewarded the next day with a different magnificent bush to the one she might have hoped for, and earning a hug from a surprisingly solid Chidi, Eleanor was uncomfortable even being this much off her guard. Later, as Michael and Tahani made their joint pitch for her to become his assistant, she at least had the consolation of knowing she was right to be concerned. 

With the note situation apparently resolved and her main rival transformed to her new, or rather first ‘bestie,’ her defences had been completely down when the three of them arrived. In fact, while Janet and Michael had described their mutual journey to creating her bliss, Eleanor’s mind began to wander as she watched his large hands reinforce his words with expressive gestures. She vaguely remembered noting his casual but frequent touching on the first day; it had felt slightly weird to her, as she rarely touched others unless she was looking to hook up. Chidi had made some passing reference the other day to… not happy, no… haptic ethics, about how the senses influence ethical perceptions. She wondered whether a touch orientated being like Michael would have a different take on Chidi’s ethics lessons than her…

‘…so I recommended you for the job!’

Stunned to silence, she forced what she hoped was a convincing smile on her face. Great, she thought, distracted by ethical thinking; this is why people hate moral philosophy professors! 

She managed to maintain eye contact with Michael’s eager blue gaze but suspected she might have been shaking her head rather than nodding before hearing herself agree. Still, he seemed pleased and totally not suspicious of her, so at least she was clearly much better at hiding this than she thought.


End file.
